THE CULT - Choice Of Weapon: Hard Rock With An Underpinning Of Joy Division Page 2
by Martin Popoff

"So I think that's the unique thing to The Cult," continues Astbury, "where we came at that period where everything is possible, no rules. Anyway, so after that, we kind of, pretty much myself, I was disillusioned with -I hate to use this word - the industry. It's not an industry anymore. It's not a... what industry? When I think of industry, I think of factories. There is no industry. It's something else. So you start something else. Personally I guess we were going to do it ourselves, and I thought the idea was people have such a short attention span, so how do you capitalize? People are giving away their music for free. It's like a fist fight. People are afraid, everybody's standing there, what are we doing? Should we do it this way, should we give it away for free, what do we charge, what do we do? So I kind of thought, you know what? Let's do something we can handle. Two songs every three months, with a film, visual element, and then do two live songs, and we'll do it in all formats, every three months. Then we'll kill it, rotate, and we'll just keep that rolling out. I thought that would be a really great way of getting music out, keeping our fans engaged, and keeping everything fresh, keeping us engaged."

"And so we brought in Chris Goss," says Ian, Goss being one of rock's finest, under-the-radar producers, but more impertinently, master of Masters Of Reality, America's Led Zeppelin, since the break-up of Cactus. "We've been talking about working with Chris Goss for quite a while, so this was the opportune time to work with Goss. So we started with Chris, we came out with the first two Capsules, and because of that we attracted a lot of attention, not only from our audience, but from labels, who are going, this is really good, this is very, very strong, we want this."

"So I was like the last one - I capitulated at the very end. Pretty much everybody was looking at me. My manager, Billy... 'It's up to you, kid.' Okay, fine. Let's go make a fully-fledged album. But this time around, we wanted to make sure that when we went into the studio, it was going to be fully realized. Songs will get the chance to really see their way to conclusion. It wasn't crammed into a 15 day recording session. So we spread it out over the period of a year. It was done pretty much spread out. We started probably doing demos for it March last year, and yeah, we didn't deliver it until about January, I think. And it was late (laughs). So it sorta got pushed back a bit."